Investigations & Analysis
Featured Articles
In-depth reporting on Georgia’s prison crisis — data-driven investigations, policy analysis, and the stories that need to be told.
Two Ways to Starve: Why Georgia’s Prison Deaths Don’t Say “Hunger”
Georgia spends $1.60 a day to feed 53,000 incarcerated adults — about 13,000 of them over fifty, some on these trays for decades. The bodies arrive at the morgue marked cardiac arrest, organ failure, natural causes. The medical literature, going back eighty years, calls it starvation...
The Game They Learned: How GDC’s Closed Promotion Pipeline Made Its Own Wardens — and Its Own Indictments
On May 13, a Georgia grand jury indicted former Smith State Prison Warden Brian Adams on RICO and bribery charges. He's the latest output of a closed promotion pipeline that has produced 43 of 43 current state wardens — and the agency cannot explain why pay raises haven't fixed it...
One Justice, One Year: How Georgia Erased a 146-Year Rule
In 2008, the Georgia Supreme Court 4-3 confirmed that defendants could challenge a void conviction under a statute Georgia had carried since 1863. Fourteen months later, after one justice retired, a new 4-3 majority erased the rule. Same statute. Same words. Different result. Article 3 of the No Way Out series...
When the Heat Comes for the Old: Georgia’s Aging Prisoners Brace for Another Deadly Summer
Three of Georgia's 35 prisons are fully air-conditioned. More than 13,000 incarcerated Georgians are 50 or older. As another deadly summer arrives — and federal courts call prison heat unconstitutional — Georgia's aging prisoners are stacked into uncooled dorms with no published heat ceiling...
Burned by the State: Junk Forensic Science and the Georgia Cases the Courts Won’t Reopen
Maria Montalvo, Sheila Denton, Dasha Fincher: across arson, bite marks, and field drug tests, junk forensic science continues to convict the innocent. Georgia is the national outlier — and almost nothing in state law lets the courts correct the record...
Candidate Profile: Damita Bishop — District 61
Damita Bishop, co-founder of prison reform nonprofit FAIR and author of the Georgia Second Chance and Smart Justice Reform Act, has qualified as a Republican candidate for House District 61. GPS profiles her criminal justice reform platform and its alignment with both the End the Warehouse and Vision 2027 campaigns...
Dunked, Stacked, and Served: Why Georgia Prison Trays Are Making People Sick
Photographs from Johnson State Prison reveal contaminated food trays — the result of broken dishwashers, chemical-barrel washing, and 30 years of deferred maintenance. Three Georgia prisons have failed health inspections since 2022 while the state spends just $0.60 per meal...
The Quiet Purge: Calhoun Edition
In less than three months, Warden Kendric Jackson transferred 87 lifers out of Calhoun State Prison — 79% to close-security facilities. GPS data reveals a systematic population swap: stable, long-term inmates shipped to Level 5 prisons while younger short-timers arrive from those same facilities. No other medium-security prison in Georgia is doing anything close to this...
Monitor, Don’t Block: Georgia’s $50M Phone Fix Is Already Installed
Georgia's prison phone crackdown spent years failing to stop $1.5 million in scams at a single prison — before and after MAS arrived. The $50M blocking system is deaf by design. Georgia already has the hardware, the law, and the precedent to monitor instead. The Commissioner needs to make one decision...
Two Thin Gloves: Georgia Prison Took Ronald Allen’s Hands
Ronald Allen asked for insulated gloves before handling frozen beef patties at GDCP. He got two pairs of disposable ones. Eight weeks of medical neglect later — a doctor who never examined him — Allen lost his dominant hand. His lawsuit names 12 defendants including Commissioner Oliver...
Have information about conditions inside Georgia’s prisons? Help us investigate.